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In the near future, UMBC should develop a plan for upgrading and updating the
SGI Challenge computer. It is certain that the demand from the faculty for
this computer will grow in the next a few years. UMBC should take a
pro-active approach to keep the Challenge's processing power, memory and disk
capacities up to the demand. It would be very counter productive if heavily
used, shared research tools such as the Challenge XL play an important role
in faculty research for just a short period of time. If the Challenge is
slowly allowed to slip below state-of-the-art we will waste time-consuming
faculty efforts that went into effectively utilizing the Challenge's
capabilities.
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ACS should continue to support faculty UNIX workstations. We should also
continue with the ACS policy to only support workstations manufactured by
Sun and SGI, although this policy should be reviewed every year to two.
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A high speed internal network should be phased in during the next several
years that will allow researchers to utilize efficient, cheap mass storage
on central servers.
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The advisability of a common UMBC mass storage facility should be considered
in concert with all ITT users/providers on campus.
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Our external network connection speeds to the Internet should be increased
occasionally to match the effective available speeds of external information
suppliers.
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Faculty need increased access to the UMBC network from home, both in terms of
additional modems (or eventually ISDN connections) and higher connect speeds.
The lack of modem connections hampers researchers ability to work at home at
night and on weekends. (This recommendation mirrors an earlier one under
Networking Infrastructure.)
Dr. Larrabee Strow
Thu Mar 30 17:21:15 EST 1995